The present inventive subject matter generally relates to digitally signing documents, and more particularly, is related to methods, systems and computer program products for digitally signing an electronic document with a user-entered signature image from a mobile computing device.
Digital documents are widespread in society today. However, at some point or another, it usually becomes necessary to print these documents in order to complete or execute them. Businesses, government agencies, and individuals are seeking methods of keeping documents in the digital domain for the life of the document, from cradle to grave. One reason this objective has evaded many is due to the need to sign documents in order to execute them.
Previous systems for digital signing require a user to pick a signing certificate from a non-intuitive list of computer signing certificates. Signing certificates may be purchased from a signing authority. However, there is no intuitive way to sign electronic documents. Most implementations show canned, generally textual only, representations. However, canned pictures of signatures are very different than the intuitive practice of actually taking a pen and writing or scrawling a signature on each signature line of a document.
Alternatively, conventional electronic signatures can be typewritten, such as the name between backslash characters, “/signature/”. However, a problem with this technique is that such signatures are easy to forge and therefore present authentication concerns.
Finally, there is a need and demand to use mobile devices such as smartphones both for convenience and security purposes to electronically sign documents.
Accordingly there is an unaddressed need in the industry to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.